Lord Bryce, a British statesman who
served as Britain's ambassador to the United
States from 1907 to 1913, once wrote that the role
of foreign policy in American life could be
described the way travelers described snakes in
Ireland: "There are no snakes in
Ireland."

That at the turn of the
twentieth century the United States had no
foreign policy worth noting was a view that, in
retrospect, many Americans would come to share.
How such a view arose is somewhat mysterious.
Americans of 1900 thought they had an active,
indeed a global, foreign policy.
The Spanish-American War had only recently ended,
and American forces were still in the midst of a
bitter war against guerrilla freedom fighters
in the Philippines. It was a time, in fact, when
many Americans were struck by a sense that the
United States was coming of age. "Th'
simple home-lovin' maiden that our fathers knew
has disappeared," said Mr. Dooley in 1902,
"an' in her place we find a Columbya,
gintlemen, with machurer charms, a knowledge iv
Euro-peen customs an' not averse to a
cigareet."

In 1895 one of America's many
successful but largely forgotten secretaries of
state, Richard Olney, had forced the British to back
down in a boundary dispute between British Guiana
(now Guyana) and Venezuela. "Today
the United States," stated Olney, "is
practically sovereign on this continent, and its
fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines
its interposition." Not content with forcing
the British to acknowledge their secondary states
in the Western Hemisphere, the United States was
exerting increasing influence in Asia. It was
Secretary of State John Hay who proclaimed the
Open Door policy toward China, and, rather
surprisingly, the other great powers accepted
American opposition to further partition of a
weak Chinese empire. Under Lord Bryce's friend
Theodore Roosevelt, the United States would
humiliate Britain three times in the
Western Hemisphere: First, the Hay-Pauncefote
Treaty of 1900 saw Britain give up its
long-standing insistence on equal rights in any
Central American canal. When the Senate rejected
this agreement as too generous to Britain, the
unhappy Lord Pauncefote, Britain's ambassador to the
United States, had to concede even more Isthmian
rights and put his name to a second and even more
humiliating agreement with Hay. The third
humiliation came when Britain, increasingly
anxious not to offend the United States at a time
when tensions were growing with Germany, agreed
to settle a boundary dispute between Alaska and
Canada on American terms.

The energetic
Roosevelt's foreign policy did not stop with
these successes. He would send the famous
"White Fleet" of the U.S. Navy on
a round-the-world tour to demonstrate the
nation's new and modern battle fleet; arbitrate
the Russo-Japanese War; send delegates to the 1906
Algeciras Conference in Spain, convened to
settle differences among the European powers
over Morocco; and generally demonstrate a level
of diplomatic activity entirely incommensurate
with the number of Hibernian snakes.

The
closing years of the nineteenth century and the
opening years of the twentieth saw American
politics roiled by a series of foreign
policy debates. Should Hawaii, Cuba, the
Philippines, or Puerto Rico be annexed, and if
so, on what terms? Should the United States continue
to participate in its de facto currency union
with Britain (the gold standard), or not? How
high should tariffs on foreign goods be–should
the United States confine itself to a
"revenue tariff" set at levels to support
the country's budgetary needs, or should it
continue or even increase the practice of
protective tariffs?

Lord Bryce knew all this
very well, but he had reasons for making
the statement he did. Like many British diplomats
of his day, he wanted the United States to remain
part of the British international system, a
world order that was in 1900 almost as elaborate
as, and in some respects even more interdependent
and integrated than, the American world order
that exists today.

There was, he conceded,
one diplomatic representative the United
States did require, however. The Americans could
fire the rest of their ambassadors and not notice
any real difference, he said, but the
United States did need to keep its ambassador at
the Court of St. James.

This change would
have been a great deal more beneficial to Great
Britain than to the United States, but the good
lord had a point. In 1900 Great Britain was at
the center of a global empire and financial system,
a system that in many respects included the
United States. On the occassion of Queen
Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, often considered
the high-water mark of British power and
prestige, the New York Times was moved to
acknowledge this fact. "We are part," said
the Times in words that were no doubt very
welcome to Lord Bryce, "and a great part, of
the Greater Britain which seems so plainly
destined to dominate the planet."

In
a certain sense the Times was right. One hundred
years ago the economic, military, and political
destiny of the United States was wrapped up in
its relationship with Great Britain. The Pax
Britannica shaped the international environment
in which the United States operated.

In the
last analysis Lord Bryce's comment was less an
informed observation about American history and
foreign policy than it was a hopeful
statement about the durability of the British
Empire. It was a prayer, not a fact. Bryce hoped
that Britain could continue to manage the European
balance of power on its own, with little more
than the passive American participation it had
enjoyed since the proclamation of the Monroe
Doctrine. The British statesmen of his day hoped
that if they offered the United States a
"free hand" in the Western Hemisphere,
and supported the Open Door policy in China, the
United States would not contest Britain's desire to
shape the destinies of the rest of the
world.

That Lord Bryce would have discounted
and minimized the importance of foreign policy in
the United States does not startle; that so
many important American writers and thinkers
would join him in a wholesale dismissal of the
country's foreign policy traditions is more
surprising. Indeed, one of the most remarkable
features about American foreign policy today is
the ignorance of and contempt for the national
foreign policy tradition on the part of so many
thoughtful people here and abroad. Most countries
are guided in large part by traditional foreign
policies that change only slowly. The British
have sought a balance of power in Europe since
the fifteenth century and the rise of the Tudors.
The French have been concerned with German land
power and British or American economic
and commercial power for almost as long. Under
both the czars and the commissars, Russia sought
to expand to the south and the west.
Those concerns still shape the foreign policy of
today's weakened Russia as it struggles to retain
control of the Caucasus, project influence into
the Balkans, and prevent the absorption of the
Baltic states and Ukraine into NATO.

Only
in the United States can there be found a wholesale
and casual dismissal of the continuities that
have shaped our foreign policy in the past.
"America's journey through international
politics," wrote Henry Kissinger, "has
been a triumph of faith over experience. . . .
Torn between nostalgia for a pristine past and
yearning for a perfect future, American thought
has oscillated between isolationism and
commitment."

At the suggestion of
columnist Joseph Alsop, the extremely
intelligent George Shultz acquired a collection
of books about American diplomacy when he became
secretary of state, but nowhere in his 1,138-page
record of more than six years' service does he
mention anything he learned from them. The 672
fascinating pages of James A. Baker III's memoirs of
his distinguished service as secretary of state
are, with the exception of a passing mention of
Theodore Roosevelt's 1903 intervention in
Panama, similarly devoid of references to the
activities of American diplomats or statesmen
before World War II.

For Richard Nixon,
American history seemed to begin and end with
the Cold War. American history before 1945 remained
a fuzzy blank to him; even in his final book he
could call the United States "the only great
power without a history of imperialistic claims on
neighboring countries"–a
characterization that would surprise such
neighboring countries as Mexico, Canada, and
Cuba (and such countries as France and Spain that
lost significant territories to American ambition)
as much as it would surprise such expansionist
American presidents as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew
Jackson, James Knox Polk, James Buchanan,
Ulysses Simpson Grant, and Theodore
Roosevelt.Other than warning about the dangers of
isolationism and offering panegyrics on American
virtues, Nixon was largely contemptuous of or
silent about the traditional aims, methods, and
views of American foreign policy, although he
frequently and respectfully referred to the
foreign policy traditions of other countries with
which he had had to deal.

The tendency to
reduce the American foreign policy tradition to a
legacy of moralism and isolationism can also be
found among the Democratic statesmen who have
attempted to guide American foreign policy in the
last twenty years. Some, like Jimmy Carter, have
embraced the moralism while rejecting the
isolationism; others share the Republican contempt
for both. The copious and learned books of
Zbigniew Brzezinski show few signs of close
familiarity with the history of American foreign
policy or with the achievements of his
predecessors, much less a sense of the
traditional strategies and goals that guided
their work. Similarly, the memoirs of former
secretary of defense Robert McNamara and former
secretary of state Dean Rusk rarely touch on
American foreign policy before 1941. When
former secretary of state Warren Christopher
selected and published the most important
speeches of his tenure in office, the collected
documents contained only one reference to the
diplomatic activity of any American before FDR,
and that was to what Christopher sees as the
failures of Woodrow Wilson's efforts
vis-à-vis the League of Nations and
human rights.

The deep lack of interest in
the history of American foreign policy is not
confined to high officials. The overwhelming
majority of their talented and hardworking
colleagues in think tanks, universities,
the national media, and government departments
that are concerned with developing, carrying out,
reporting, and reflecting on the foreign policy
of the United States do not know very much about the
history of American foreign policy before World
War II, do not particularly want to learn more
than they already know, and cannot think what
practical purpose a deeper knowledge of American
foreign policy history might serve.

This lack
of knowledge and curiosity about the history of
American foreign policy contrasts with what is in
general a passion for historical learning among
our foreign policy intellectuals. The history of
American foreign policy from Pearl Harbor forward
is well known and well studied. Lives of such
statesmen as Dean Acheson, the Bundy brothers, and
Harry Truman–sometimes long and detailed
biographies running to several
large volumes–find respectable audiences,
as do the memoirs of living American statesmen.
Foreign policy analysts and journalists are also
reasonably well versed in the domestic side of
American history and, particularly since the end
of the Cold War, the American foreign policy
establishment justly prides itself on its
knowledge of the histories and cultures of
the many peoples and nations with which American
foreign policy has had to deal. It is only the
history of our foreign policy before World War
II that lies buried in obscurity.

The
widespread indifference to and disdain for that
history is, at least on the face of things,
somewhat surprising. The United States has had
a remarkably successful history in international
relations. After a rocky start, the young
American republic quickly established itself as a
force to be reckoned with. The Revolutionaries
shrewdly exploited the tensions in European
politics to build a coalition against Great Britain.
Artful diplomatic pressure and the judicious
application of incentives and threats enabled the
United States to emerge from the Napoleonic Wars
with the richest spoils of any nation–the
Louisiana Purchase rose on the ruins of
Napoleon's hopes for a New World empire. During the
subsequent decades, American diplomacy managed to
outmanuever Great Britain and the Continental
powers on a number of occasions, annexing Florida,
extending its boundary to the Pacific, opening
Japan to world commerce, thwarting British
efforts to consolidate the independence of Texas,
and conquering the Southwest from Mexico despite
the reservations of the European
powers.

During the Civil War, deft American
diplomacy defeated repeated efforts by powerful
elements in both France and Britain to intervene on
behalf of Confederate independence. The United
States demonstrated a sure diplomatic touch
during the conflict, prudently giving in over the
seizure of Confederate commissioners from a
British ship in the Trent affair, but firmly
forcing a reluctant Great Britain to observe the
principles of neutrality and to pay compensation
for their violation in the controversies over
Confederate ships built by British
firms.

Within a generation after the Civil
War, the United States became a recognized world
power while establishing an unchallenged hegemony in
the Western Hemisphere. As to American
intervention in World War I, it was a failure
only compared to the lofty goals Wilson set for
himself. The United States failed to end war
forever and to establish a universal democratic
system–challenging goals, to say the
least–but otherwise it did very well. With
fewer casualties than any other great power, and
fewer forces on the ground in Europe, the United
States had a disproportionately influential role
in shaping the peace. Monarchical government in
Europe disappeared as a result of the war: Since
1918 Europe has been a continent of republics,
and the great thrones and royal houses that once
mocked the United States and its democratic
pretensions have vanished from the
earth.

Fashionable though it has long been to
scorn the Treaty of Versailles, and flawed though
that instrument undoubtedly was, one must note that
Wilson's principles survived the eclipse of the
Versailles system and that they still guide
European politics today: self-determination,
democratic government, collective security,
international law, and a league of nations.
Wilson may not have gotten everything he wanted at
Versailles, and his treaty was never ratified by
the Senate, but his vision and his diplomacy, for
better or worse, set the tone for the twentieth
century. France, Germany, Italy, and Britain may
have sneered at Wilson, but every one of these
powers today conducts its European policy along
Wilsonian lines. What was once dismissed as
visionary is now accepted as fundamental. This
was no mean achievement, and no European statesman
of the twentieth century has had as lasting, as
benign, or as widespread
an influence.

Even in the short term, the
statesmen who sneered at Wilson did no
better than he did. The leaders of France,
Britain, and Italy–George Clemenceau, David
Lloyd George, and Vittorio Orlando–did not do
very well at Versailles; none of them gained
anything of real or lasting value by the peace.
The United States was the only true winner of World
War I, as it had been the real winner of the
Napoleonic conflicts of the
previous century.

World War I made the
United States the world's greatest financial
power, crushed Germany–economically,
America's most dangerous rival–and
reduced both Britain and France to a status where
neither country could mount an effective
opposition to American designs anywhere in the
world. In the aftermath of the war Britain
conceded to the United States something it had
withheld from all its rivals in two centuries of
warfare: Britain accepted the United States as
co-monarch of the seas, formally recognizing the
right of the United States to maintain a navy equal
to its own. Wilson and Warren Harding succeeded
where Napoleon and Wilhelm II had failed,
and they did it without a war with Great Britain.
An American diplomacy that asserted American
interests while emphasizing the community of
values between the two principal English-speaking
nations induced Great Britain to accept
peacefully what no previous rival had extracted by
force.

Excerpted from Special Providence by
Walter Russell Mead
Copyright 2001 by Walter Russell Mead. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.